Sunday, January 24, 2010

Japan gets Android Xperia X10 SmartPhone first

Japan gets Android Xperia X10 SmartPhone first: "The device will recognize up to 5 faces in your contacts from your camera shots and will automatically store them under the appropriate contact.

You can tag a photo and the device will scan through every other photo in the album and provided 75 percent of a face is captured on a photo, it will also tag those it recognizes as the same person. Like it!"

Saturday, August 8, 2009

How tech is changing banks

How tech is changing banks: "The United Services Automobile Association, a financial services company for members of the U.S. military and veterans, plans to launch a free iPhone app that lets you deposit checks via your iPhone camera. The service will be called USAA Deposit@Mobile. To make a deposit, you use the app to log onto your account, enter the amount of the check, snap a picture of the front and back of the check, then touch the 'Send' button. The bank sends a confirmation. Here's a video demo."

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Amazon Web Services Secrets Revealed - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek

Amazon Web Services Secrets Revealed - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek: "Rosen plans to provide more data and analysis sometime soon around the growth rate of AWS. Here's a sneak peek: Rosen tells me that EC2 is experiencing monthly growth of 'almost 10%.' If accurate, that's huge growth, and it reinforces our general impression that cloud computing is out-pacing the rest of the IT industry. I've got a query into Amazon to check Rosen's estimate, but no response yet. Financial analysts should press Amazon for details on AWS revenues and growth during its upcoming conference call on results for the second quarter of the year."

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Heroku | Pricing

For hacking - this is too nice. A full Ruby on Rails environment, with hosting, and ssl, and domain masking, all for FREE. Heroku is a cloud-like scalabale Ruby offering, and this level is worth a try.

Heroku | Pricing

VIDEO: Suicide Micro Air Vehicles - Flight International

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction... this is a video about the near-future Air-Force Unmanned Flying Vehicles, which look alot like birds, can fly through hallways, and get recharged by landing on a power line.

VIDEO: Suicide Micro Air Vehicles - Flight International: "Watch this video, care of the Chicago Tribune newspaper�website, about the US Air Force Research Laboratory's computer generated vision of bird and insect-like Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) of the future including a suicide MAV that explodes on making contact with its human target"

Find movies, TV shows matching your taste watch online - Jinni

Just came across jinni which is a Pandora-like site for movies. Supposedly, you can just put in a plot you like, and it shows you movies that match that plot (like " sci-fi movies that save the world"). It's not perfect though, and you have to make sure you get genres and plots exactly like they are categorized. For example, my first two searches, "awesome action movies" and "boobs" both returned no results. Damn, and here I was thinking it would read my mind.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Hip Hop Schools Silicon Valley

All good advice here...

Hip Hop Schools Silicon Valley: "-4- Be Happy Working It.�� Chamillionaire, drove 200 miles to sell 200 CDs… on consignment.� They don’t pay you to rap. They pay you to promote."

3 Free Ways to Geolocate By IP

For future reference...

3 Free Ways to Geolocate By IP

What is the minimum viable product? - Venture Hacks

This is a fantastic article/interview... It's exactly what I think about the viability of products you dream up. Several "tests" are also suggested, such as a quick AdWords campaign. It's chock full of wisdom.

What is the minimum viable product? - Venture Hacks: "Again, you’ve got to remember that 99% of the time nobody wants it. Most offers that appear to an entrepreneur as a good idea are actually horrible, horrible ideas. By making the offer and having it be rejected by customers, we learn not to waste time building stuff that nobody wants.

Nivi: Right. Maybe the right definition of a minimum viable product, like you were saying, is, essentially a test to see whether people will actually want the product that you’re imagining in your head."

Friday, March 27, 2009

Slashdot | Android Scans DVD Bar Codes, Downloads Movies

Too cool - 

Slashdot | Android Scans DVD Bar Codes, Downloads Movies: "A new Android application called BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent) can scan any DVD bar code and then signals either uTorrent or Vuze on your PC to download the movie from BitTorrent. How long do you think this will last?'"

BankerMLS.com | Welcome

Worth a look if you live in Birmingham :)

BankerMLS.com | Welcome

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Britain seeing decline in rude names - UPI.com

Britain seeing decline in rude names - UPI.com: "By comparing the population of 2008 with Britain's initial census in 1881, Webber found the number of people named Daft has decreased by more than 50 percent. Individuals laden with the name Balls have also fallen by more than half, while the number of people named Cock in Britain has decreased by 75 percent."